Posted on 01/14/2018 2:01:33 PM PST by nickcarraway
Military historian Max Boot's new book asks if the Vietnam war could have been won if CIA operative Edward Lansdale's advice had been heeded
I was with an acquaintance who had participated in the agency’s secret air operations in Laos during the 1960s. After exchanging cards, my friend popped a question: Did Colby think that history could have been changed and over a million deaths averted if the US had accepted Ho Chi Minh’s offer of an alliance at the end of World War II?
Colby, who oversaw a CIA counter-insurgency program in Vietnamese villages that killed upwards of 40,000 civilians, thought for a moment. “Guys, we’ll never know the answer to that question,” he said with a haunting twinkle in his eye.
Forty-two years after the last American helicopter left Saigon, it still rankles some that history might have taken a different turn.
Max Boot, a military historian and foreign policy analyst, revisits that question in a well wrought and entertaining biography of Edward Lansdale, the legendary CIA operative whom he credits as the first to advocate a “hearts and minds” approach to winning wars in the Philippines and Vietnam.
Boot argues in The Road Not Taken: Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam that the maverick advertising man turned covert-action specialist actually championed a policy that relied on winning popular support by focusing on the causes of insurgencies, rather than brute military strength.
Needless to say Lansdale’s prescriptions were ignored by an entrenched US military bureaucracy and ruling class that favored B-52 bomber strikes over winning popular trust.
“It is no exaggeration to suggest that the whole conflict, the worst military defeat in American history, might have taken a very different course — one that was less costly and potentially more successful — if the counsel of
(Excerpt) Read more at atimes.com ...
Or “America’s Most Trusted Man” hadn’t lied about Tet
The politicians lost the war on purpose.
We did win the fricking war.
Teddy Kennedy and the other traitors in the senate threw it away.
The USA was in Vietnam at the end of WW2. The land of liberty gave the Vietnamese back to France. In other words the USA betrayed the nation of Vietnam. The USA should have stayed there and could have helped to get the nation back on its feet. Roads, water wells, sanitation, money crops, medical clinics. Instead the USA gave it back to the French. Nuff said. A big mistake. The Vietnamese could have our friend and the war could have never happened.
We lost that war - but we didn’t. I spent many years working in Asia and attended many diplomatic dinners. Repeatedly, representatives of local nations would thank us, genuinely, and personally, for Vietnam. They stated that the war stalemated communist advances in the region long enough for their democracies to stabilize. Without that war they believed all of Asia would have fallen.
So to all you Vietnam vets out there: Your blood and tears prevented literally hundreds of millions from experiencing blood and tears. War is never sanitary but you slogged through and kept the wolf at bay for most of Asia. Hold your heads high. We salute you.
“...the worst military defeat in American history.” This is a lie the left loves to spout. Anyone who was in Viet Nam in the period 1970=1972 knows that the American drawdown occurred during a period of relative peace. It was possible to drive — yes drive — from Quang Tri to the Ca Mau Peninsula without taking fire, or from Kontum to Pleiku, without even expecting to take fire. Pure and simple, Viet Nam was a political defeat, an outcome that can be blamed on the Democrats in the Senate of the United States and Democrats in general.
The failed “hearts and minds” approach overlooks the fact that the cause of communist insurgencies is raw evil.
What’s w/ this guy Max Boot? I mean, other than having a pretty cool name, he seems like a royal tool.
Or just another Neocon?
We won until the Democrats said “We can’t have THIS”.
“Colby, who oversaw a CIA counter-insurgency program in Vietnamese villages that killed upwards of 40,000 civilians...”
I hold no brief for Colby, a man I personally disliked, but the statement that the creation of the CORDS program he supervised killed upwards of 40,000 people is no more true than the statement Teddy Kennedy never took a drink in his life. The PRU, Province Reconnaisance Units effectively tracked down and eliminted the local Viet Cong leadership. However, their job benefitted immeasurably from the TET offensive, which in effect decapitated the Viet Cong in South Viet Nam. One example: In Quang Tin province, I Corps, prior to TET the PRU had a list of 187 names to be eliminated. Two months after TET, during which the indigenous Viet Cong was sacrificed there were only a handful of VC leaders left. The same held true for Quang Tri.
It is a sad fact that hundreds of interrogations of Viet Cong prisoners undertaken by US Marines in the I Corps region of Viet Nam have never (to my knowledge) been declassified. If plumbed, they would offer a wealth of information to the historian and help provide a true picture of events and security concerns that existed in Viet Nam from 1956-1970.
“Pure and simple, Viet Nam was a political defeat, an outcome that can be blamed on the Democrats in the Senate of the United States and Democrats in general.”
(Applause, applause, applause.)
Curtis LeMay proved it could work, so it is no surprise that Air Force brass wanted to keep doing it until it didn't work.
Also if the government of the Republic of South Vietnam wasn’t so insistent on favoring Catholics over the Buddhist majority. We didn’t lose the war, they did.
“They stated that the war stalemated communist advances in the region long enough for their democracies to stabilize. Without that war they believed all of Asia would have fallen.”
And the slobbering morons still mock “the domino theory” as though it were foolish.
Soviets in high places have said that Viet Nam hastened the fall of the Evil Empire by a decade.
Boot’s argument is fatuous. The idea that the US could have worked with the committed Marxist Ho and we should have done so after WWII is about as realistic an argument as: If the Germans hadn’t sent Lenin by train back to Russia the Soviet Union would never have been created; if the British hadn’t marched on Lexington the colonies would never have gone to war; etc., etc., etc. History is what it is, not what people like Boot would have it.
Had Nixon bombed the hell out of NV for maybe 5 more days in December 72, and demanded a full NVA withdrawal from SVA, Cambodia and Laos, he would have gotten it and the war won. So close but by that point, the only goal was to get the POWs home. They could not see the success they were having with round the clock bombings and harbor minings because of their own short sightedness.
NeverTrump neocon Das Boot claims that “if only” the USA had slavishly followed the eccentric ideas of some obscure analyst, SE Asia history would have been different.
The USA since WW2 has consistently had the problem that the side they supported in civil wars was militarily inferior to the opposition. In every case the side that the US supported was corrupt, defeatist, and the leadership elite had an escape plan with their stolen wealth.
You can just go down the list: China, Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, iran, Central America, and currently, Afghanistan.
The USA managed to save S Korea, Central America and Afganistan (so far) and lost everywhere else.
Trump is currently struggling with what to do on Afghanistan. He has rejected the “strategy” advocated by McMaster - which is doubling down on 16 years of failure.
I don’t know what to suggest that the elites of these failing states should not be allowed to flee with their stolen loot to comfortable exile.
If it becomes do or die for these corrupt “leaders” maybe it would put some fight in them. And they might start to win, instead of “steal, lose and flee”.
That’s the key word to the whole debacle in south-east Asia: France.
Who also caused almost all of the problems following World War 1 (i.e., Treaty of Versailles), some of which we continue to suffer from today (i.e., Sykes-Picot).
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